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Flash 9 Beta for Linux Available

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the watch-it-now dept.

DemiKnute writes "According to the official Penguin.SWF blog, the a beta release of the long-awaited Flash 9 for Linux is available for download, a mere year after the release for Windows." From the blog: "While we are still working out exactly how to distribute the final Player version to be as easy as possible for the typical end user, this beta includes 2 gzip'd tarball packages: one is for the Mozilla plugin and the other is for a GTK-based Standalone Flash Player. Either will need to be downloaded manually via the Adobe Labs website and unpacked. The standalone Player (gflashplayer) can be run in place (after you set its executable permission). The plugin is dropped into your local plugin directory (for a local user) or the system-wide plugin directory." Report bugs here.

5 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Re:AMD64 version? by Anssi55 · · Score: 5, Informative

    You could try nspluginwrapper.

  2. gentoo ebuilds by kswtch · · Score: 5, Informative

    here and here.

  3. Good news! by bioglaze · · Score: 5, Informative

    Even being beta version, Flash 9 for GNU/Linux works very well when compared to previous player.

    Some flash movies that hogged Firefox UI with old player work flawlessy now. Audio is now in sync with video.

    While not perfect, this release makes me wonder when the free software Gnash player reaches a usable state. Being a free software enthuasist, i generally don't like the idea of using a proprietary plugin, but being also pragmatic, i use it. I also think that the official Flash plugin could be faster and more bug-free, if the source code were available and under a GPL compatible licence.

    That being said, i still think it's important that GNU/Linux users, especially Average Joe, have a lot less hassle with badly designed, flash-dependent websites.

    --
    Who is John Galt?
    1. Re:Good news! by sarathmenon · · Score: 5, Informative
      While not perfect, this release makes me wonder when the free software Gnash player reaches a usable state. Being a free software enthuasist, i generally don't like the idea of using a proprietary plugin, but being also pragmatic, i use it. I also think that the official Flash plugin could be faster and more bug-free, if the source code were available and under a GPL compatible licence.
      gnash is usable enough for me. Most ads works (sigh), and from what I've seen pretty much everything is rendered fine except for the flv videos. Now that ffmpeg and xine have full flv7 support, its only a matter of time before we can start to see gnash support youtube in its full glory. The best part is that it "works" on an x86_64.
      --
      Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
  4. Compiling bugs by thebluesgnr · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are a few problems with this release that I hope will be fixed in the future (I can only hope, since it's not open source yet).

    The plugin will search for libssl.so and libasound.so; that's broken. They should dlopen the actual library or build it statically, but a hack like that is certainly going to cause problems. (btw, in Ubuntu/Debian you need the libssl-dev and libasound2-dev packages to use all the features of this plugin).

    The most annoying bugs I had with Flash (believe it or not) are still there. If the mouse is hovering a Flash content inside a browser window, the browser won't recognize keyboard or even mouse events. This is annoying when you're scrolling through a page with Flash ads or when you want to Ctrl+L but the damn mouse is in the wrong place.

    The other problem is that Flash ads that have the "point your mouse here to see the full ad" will always display the "full ad", and you have to choose between the Flash Block extension and not reading that damn page at all.